Passion, People and Principles

Blawg Review #76

It is my honor to host the Blawg Review, a weekly selection of blogs related to the law.

Since I am not a lawyer, and this blog site is meant to appeal to a broad international audience working in a wide variety of professions and industries, I have (as previously announced) restricted my choices to the themes of work and professional life, firm management, marketing, strategy and careers (rather than legal topics per se).

Ed Wesemann has a terrific blog for law firms called Creating Dominance, and his latest post is about â€œthrottlingâ€ clients (no, it doesn’t mean what you think it means). Itâ€™s not glamorous stuff, but itâ€™s important.

He discusses how he went about analyzing low-profitability clients, and then engaging actions which induced the clients to change their behavior (or leave). A clear exposition of some basic that all firms should be doing — and don’t!

â€œI have met many hot worm lawyers and I suspect there may be whole firms composed primarily of hot worms. These lawyers thrive on conditions that might prove injurious or even fatal to other lawyers. I am concerned for the hot worm lawyers and the damage that might be done to them if someone decided that these torrid wigglers needed to swim in cooler waters, to achieve life balance as defined by some other worm. In many cases, a cool, balanced worm may be an unhappy or dead worm. Lawyers come in a wide variety of temperaments, each with a unique, individual, ideal allocation of what and how much goes on each scale of life. That uniqueness is best respected for the sake of the lawyer, the firm, and the client.â€

I have read the book, and â€œAdamâ€ is right. Managing partners in law firms should buy copies for all their junior lawyers. In addition, I would estimate that at least one-half of the book applies to all young professionals, in any industry.

Arnie reports that, according to the piece, a key discovery the researchers made is that workersâ€™ performance is tied to their â€œemotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment”. There are lots of other good links in the blog to research in the field of â€œPositive Organizational Scholarship.â€

The questions is raised: when firms large and small can serve your needs, where do you go? Think carefully, and on the back of examination booklet explain why friendly neighborhood grocery stores no longer exist.

BTIâ€™s findings (which have been extensively reported for a while now) should be the springboard for deeper discussion of the sources and cures of low client satisfaction in the law, but so far the analysis hasn’t progressed — at least in the blogosphere. Letâ€™s hope the firms themselves are taking the hint.

â€œwhipped through college in one year, relying on a combination of 72 AP credits that he collected in high school, followed by 23 credits his first semester in college (instead of the usual 15), a whopping 37 credits the next (he’d complained that he had too much time on his hands the first semester), with the last three, needed for a double major, completed during the summer. The article reports that after finishing up a masterâ€™s in math, Banh will forego the doctorate and head to law school to become a patent attorney.”

For the few who don’t know his background, itâ€™s a good place to start getting to know the well-known lawyer, consultant, speaker and writer who is considered among the most influential experts on the application of technology in the practice of law.

Dennis was very kind and generous with his time when I was trying to understand what a blog was. If you don’t know him and his work, you should.

Justin Patten at Human Law has a brief piece speculating on how blogging might influence the practice of law: â€œI envisage scenarios where lawyers in conjunction with PR Professionals and blogosphere monitoring tools, assess how a case is being seen on the web. Thereafter an assessment will be made whether a legal remedy is the right solution.â€

18. Regulatory Restrictions on Blogging

Walter Olson at Point of Law collects some links pointing to the emerging concern that new Bar regulations in New York â€œmight make it nearly impossible for attorneys in the state to publish or contribute to blogs about the law. (Each individual post would trigger elaborate compliance obligations of its own.)â€

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David has asked: Are we all too competitive for our own good? If so, how has civilization thrived? Don’t miss it.

I think, by nature, we are far too competitive. Or more accurately, not that we are, society turns us more and more competitive. Letâ€™s remember, many years ago the cave folks were not competitive. They were collaborative. They could work together like the bits and bobs in s Swiss watch, and I donâ€™t mean a $10 Chinese replica Rolex.

Today, there is one organisation that hires people without resumes, references or specific educational background, and turns them into the most reliable teams there is. It instils collaboration from day one, and ruthlessly destroys prima donnas and egomaniacs. This organisation is also often referred as the â€œUltimate Professional Service Firm.â€

So, what is this firm? Well, the military. Itâ€™s the best apprentice programme on the planet. And its teaching method is so effective that they can train great professionals out of novices in a short space of time even if they join the â€œfirmâ€ with zero knowledge just a burning desire to succeed.

In my work (Iâ€™m an ex-military myself), what Iâ€™ve found is that the more I can instil this â€œarmy cultureâ€ in a firm, the better they perform and the more profitable they become. And Iâ€™m not talking about yelling drill sergeants. I mean expectations and consequences. Itâ€™s human nature that what we expect of people is what we get.

So, where is the problem? The two major building blocks of the military culture are commitment and accountability. Professionals by nature hate both. A junior Harvard MBA will resent to be held accountable by a senior partner with an undergrad degree from a “second-rate” University.

But Iâ€™ve also found that when senior partners run the firms like drill sergeants as if peopleâ€™s lives depended on their actions, everyone seems to take work seriously.

As an experiment, we started implementing a â€œconsequenceâ€ system at a clientâ€™s firm. When people violate the firmâ€™s Code of Conduct, depending on the degree of violation, they are sentenced to â€œhard labour.â€ There is an agency called Labour Ready that provides temporary workers for construction sites. This is usually pretty hard labour. Violators are sentenced to putting in time at the agency. During this time the firm suspends payment to them. Itâ€™s interesting how much people’s perspectives can change after two weeks of being sandwiched between a hardhat and a pair of steel-toed boots.

Firms expect collaboration, but there is individual compensation. At a few firms Iâ€™ve worked with, we flattened the payment system. Everyone got paid the same. Plus partners own the firm. Individualistic egomaniacs rebelled against it. They were asked to leave. The goal was to increase the firmâ€™s earning potential through teamwork. The more the firm earns the more people in the firm earn. And this contrarian act improved teamwork. Now itâ€™s a team. Everyone is on the same footing.

What is my approach based on? Year after year more and more people want to join the military. And many of them stay there for life. So, far this is the best model Iâ€™ve found for professional firms.

And one more reason Iâ€™ve found useful to model the army. Fee objections are virtually unknown. What the army wants is what the army gets. Governments donâ€™t haggle with armies when they ask for a few billion to buy a few fighter planes, heavy horses, submarines or even trebuchets.

And many people who have been in the army remember their army years as some of the best years of their lives.

I know on the surface the army if endless yelling, command and control. But under the surface there is a bit more. And maybe this is where we could take some lessons from and apply them to professional firms.